It's actually quite healthy in retrospect. As I've blogged, the party needs to clearly (IMHO) brand itself as a fiscal conservative, libertarian party - as opposed to a socially conservative party.

And sometimes the best lessons are the hardest ones.

The good news as well - as irritated as I am with the new Premier, I take solice that I'm not in Quebec, where, apparently you riot in the streets when the government suggests you pay tuition lower than almost every other Province in Canada.

So. No biggy. I mean, it doesn't seem that long ago that Stockwell Day was taking his lumps federally, does it?

Wild Rose isn't viable without the social conservative base, at the same time it can't win a general election with bozone eruptions. Stephen Harper managed that situation through the shortest of leashes and sheer force of will. Is Danielle Smith strong enough to strong-arm the social conservatives into a cone of shame?

Rob thinks only rich kids should be allowed to go to university. And his Conservative buddies are bringing in semi-slave labour so the lower wages paid to temporary immigrants can drag down everybody else's wages too, so fewer Canadians will be able to afford tuition, fewer people will have much education, and fewer people will have the brains to vote against the rightwing thugs destroying Canada.

By the by, if I remember, worse things than even that were in the Alberta Report. Link was always a brute, although the magazine itself was significantly better quality than the Western Standard that followed it.

Also, I am suspicious of bozo interruptions a the key to the election. That works in most of Calgary perhaps, but would Wildrose have done so badly in rural and urban Alberta both on the basis of a few nasty zingers made public a week before the election? These bozos may have lost them a few seats, but they don't explain the extent of the Wildrose failure. Perhaps fear of Wildrose allowed the Tories to win in western Lethbridge. I think we should admit that Albertans just are not interested in being ruled by either Randians or socons.